A multi-site solution
Triscan covers the demand for automotive spare parts and accessories through importing, creating concepts and packaging the products. They operate with three distribution centers: the parent company in Aarhus, Denmark, a service store in Copenhagen and Triscan Svenska AB in Stockholm, Sweden. Triscan also has its own sales office near Düsseldorf, Germany.
“When selecting our new IT system, we quickly focused on Axapta as the best product to support our demands for a technologically advanced, internationally based ERP solution. It was of primary importance to support our stock control, sales, and distribution of 35,000 part items for the European after-market,” states Morten Hallum, IT Director at Triscan.
Centralized solution – separate local currencies
The Triscan solution is run centrally from the Danish headquarters on a closed, secure network over the internet via Microsoft WTS (Windows Terminal Service) using a VPN connection to users in the Swedish subsidiary and sales offices in Copenhagen and Germany. Triscan has two sets of accounts, Danish and Swedish, making full use of Axapta abilities to handle different languages and currencies in one integrated solution.
Triscan also has the Enterprise Module for Axapta developed by Columbus IT Partner. This allows Triscan to create an order in the Swedish company that gets registered in the Danish accounting system, then delivers products back to Sweden.
Conversion tool, barcodes and logistics
In addition, Triscan utilizes a Columbus-developed integration suite called Galaxy.
Morten explains: “Galaxy was used for conversion of data from the legacy system into Axapta, but it also handles barcodes.
Galaxy works as the conversion tool for taking customer orders via FTP and EDI too.”
Integrated Web solution – 4 languages Triscan has a special web solution in four languages that handles an electronic catalogue of 35,000 products for 12,000 car model types in Europe. This solution is based on SOAP, Java and XML integrated with the Axapta COM functionality that allows product searching, stock control, the ‘shopping basket', and online delivery/order acknowledgement checking.
Management overview and MRP planning
Morten explains that the dimensions in Axapta are a big improvement for management, giving better overview of the business and more precise forecasts. The MRP functionality was new to Tridon, providing solid planning capabilities. They also got their budget and financial data integrated with sales.